Website design news, tips and advice

On 25th May 2018, the way in which businesses (both inside and outside the EU) are allowed to collect, store and process personal data will change forever.

It’s why your email inbox is currently awash with messages from businesses kindly asking if you can re-subscribe to their newsletter list. It’s also why Facebook and many other giants of industry are having a rather bright spotlight pointed in their direction.

If nothing else, the forthcoming GDPR rules are making it abundantly clear that personal data is just that – personal and to be used entirely legitimately.

You may have made strides towards website GDPR compliance already, but it’s highly possible you’ll have overlooked a few vital areas.

Understanding the difference between active, unbundled and granular

The three words above all refer to the type of opt-in you offer anyone who enters personal data into your website. Fall foul of their intricacies, and you might slip on one of the biggest GDPR banana skins.

Understanding all three will also make the process of checking your forms far easier.

Active opt-in. If you have a form which includes a tick box for newsletter subscription, it must, by default, be set to whatever indicates “no, I don’t want to receive your newsletters”.

Unbundled opt-in. Any consent you request – be it a newsletter subscription or the promise of personalised offers – must be listed separately on your forms. A typical example of this is to have two separate tick boxes for newsletter subscription and terms and conditions acceptance.

Granular opt-in. If you want to contact people by email, telephone and snail mail, you’ll need to give them all three options as separate forms of consent.

Easy withdrawal

How easy is it for people to withdraw their consent from your marketing program? Can they do it at all?

Pick a great email marketing client, and it will include easy opt-out options for newsletter subscribers. Equally, if you have some form of customer login facility on your website, it’ll pay to have a section where they can change their subscription settings.

Naming your partners

Do you collect personal data with the intention to pass it onto partners or subsidiaries within your business? If so, you’ll need to make it ultra-clear on sign-up forms.

This is why you’ll see forms featuring tick boxes like the following:

[ ] I’d prefer not to receive updates from Bank ABC

[ ] I’d prefer not to receive updates from Bank ABC Mortgage Division

Whether you or your partner likes it or not, the name has to be there in order to comply with the GDPR’s rules.

The nuts and bolts of your website

Depending on the role your website plays, it may rely on third party services, apps and plugins to provide functionally for users.

If any of those additions come into contact with personal data (for instance, a plug-in that captures email addresses to provide access to gated content), they’ll need to be GDPR compliant.

This is why it’s worth conducting an audit of the nuts and bolts of your website (with the help of an expert) to ensure the developers behind any add-ons have their own GDPR compliance under control.

And finally…

Lots of business will be scrambling towards GDPR compliance as 25th May looms large, but if you have the basics covered, and take time to sniff out the less obvious stuff above, you’ll have a far easier time meeting the new requirements.

Lastly, a little disclaimer. The advice offered in this post is of the general variety and is certainly not legal advice. If you are at all unsure about any aspects of the GDPR and how it might impact your business, we recommend seeking professional legal input.

The same now goes for Google; if your website performs poorly on mobile – or, worse, is inaccessible on small screens – it will drop you down the ranks.

That means if you’re still not mobile-ready, you’re facing an even steeper uphill battle to be discovered on the world’s most important search engine.

What is mobile-first indexing and how does it work?

Google’s job is to serve its users relevant search results, and it will do so either based on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising or ‘natural’ search listings.

The mobile-first index primarily impacts the latter (although that doesn’t mean you can get away Scott-free on PPC!), and it does what it says on the tin; Google will analyse your website’s mobile performance first and base its ranking for your website on those findings.

Before, it would look at the desktop version and determine the ranking from there. If a mobile version existed, it would boost the mobile rank accordingly, but this would have little impact on the overall ranking of your site.

Now, mobile is everything, which is why, if Google is thinking mobile-first, we all need to do the same!

What do I need to do about mobile-first indexing?

Start with the obvious: check your website on your smartphone. If it’s cumbersome to use, or you have to pinch to zoom in and out of the content, Google won’t like it – simple.

Despite this, even websites that look great and operate fantastically on mobile devices may have underlying issues that will prevent them from being ranked highly.

This is where you’ll need some input from an expert, but details such as your metadata (the text that sits within the code of your website describing the purpose of your site and its keywords), the sitemap and speed of page loads will all count towards the mobile-first indexing.

Common mobile-first index questions – answered

Mobile-first indexing understandably raises a lot of questions, and unless you’re deeply ingrained in digital marketing and web development, you simply can’t be expected to know all the answers.

We’d therefore like to answer some of the most common for you!

Q: Is the mobile-first index impacting my site now?

A: Not necessarily. A change this comprehensive will take time, and in ablog post from December 2017, Google has confirmed it will be “evaluating sites independently on their readiness for mobile-first indexing based on the above criteria and transitioning them when ready”, but admit they can’t offer a timeline for when it will be completed.

Q: Will Google only use the mobile-readiness of my site to determine its ranking?

A: Not necessarily; the desktop version of your website is still important. You may, for instance, have certain pages that aren’t mobile-ready, and they’ll still be taken into consideration.

Q: What if my website doesn’t work at all on mobile?

A: Your website will still be indexed, but if the competition have a mobile presence, they’ll always appear above you.

Q: What if I have a separate mobile site compared to a fully responsive site?

A: Fully-responsive is the way to go, but if you do have a separate mobile website, you need to ensure the content on it is pretty much identical to that of the desktop version.

Q: My mobile site hides certain navigation elements and pages – is this an issue?

A: No – particularly if this is done to improve the overall user experience. Google will still be able to crawl that content in the background, anyway.

Wrap up

A full roll-out of the mobile-first index will admittedly take some time, but that doesn’t mean you can sit back and wait for it to hit your website’s rankings.

The time to plan and optimise for small screen devices is now. Don’t let Google leave you behind.

From May 2018, small business owners like you will need to ensure your website is GDPR compliant, or face some pretty costly consequences.

If you haven’t been sleeping under a rock for the past few months, you may have an idea of the what this means and how it will affect you website. But, just in case you have been creeping with the crustaceans, here is our guide to ensuring your website is ready for the General Data Protection Regulation:

What exactly is the GDPR?

Over the last four years, the EU has been working to bring data protection legislation into line with the way in which data is now used.

Although we’re currently still covered by The Data Protection Act 1998, the new legislation introduces tougher fines for non-compliance and breaches, and gives people more say over how and when companies can use their data.

The changes are designed to give people more control over how companies like Facebook and Google swap data for use of their services.

The current legislation came into being long before social media found new ways of exploiting our personal data, therefore these changes are very much required to reflect the new ways in which we share out personal information.

Who needs to be concerned about the new GDPR legislation?

Both ’Controllers’ and ‘Processors’ of data need to abide by the new GDPR rulings.

To break that down further, the data Controller states how and why personal data is processed, while a Processor is the party doing the actual processing of the data.

The “Controller” could be any organisation, from a profit-seeking company to a charity or government, and your “Processor” could be an IT firm doing the actual data processing.

Will your website be ready for the GDPR?

From 25th May 2018, simply asking visitors to your website to familiarise themselves with your data protection policy will not be enough.

That means no more “click here to read our privacy policy” warnings; instead you will need to ensure that your website, form submissions and storage all fully comply with the new GDPR legislation.

In preparation for these huge changes, make sure you have your bases covered.

Review your website

Before you can make any changes to your website, you’ll need to review your current strategy, and identify exactly what you’re using data for, where it’s being stored and how long you are storing it for.

You may also need to fine tune or completely change the way you conduct your business to ensure you policies are in line with the new regulations.

Update your privacy notices

It’s all very well changing your privacy policies behind the scenes, but in the interest of transparency, you will need to explain clearly what information you will be collecting and how you intend to use it, on any web page that asks for user data.

Update your associated policies

By this we mean you will need to look at and probably change your data retention policy as well as your terms and conditions.

A copy of the same policies must be easily accessible on your website and should be concise and transparent. Your terms and conditions will also need to reference the GDPR in their terminology.

Review your data capture functionality

This will include all of your databases, systems and resources that you currently have connected to your website so that you can be 100% sure you’re keeping all personal data safe and effectively managing communication preferences, including the use of third party tracking software (think Google Analytics or Facebook’s ‘pixel’).

User account functionality

You’ll need to review and amend the user’s ability to update their own consent and communication preferences on your website.

This means you’ll need to ask visitors to opt in to your data capture, as opposed to asking them to opt out (no more pre-ticked boxes!). This will apply to any information you want them to subscribe to, and each aspect must be consented to separately.

Wrapping up

We should point out that the above is purely our own guidance on where to start with the process of making your website GDPR compliant. This is not legally binding, and if you have any concerns we recommend you seek additional advice from a GDPR expert well before May 2018.

Big changes are coming to the way we capture, use and store our website visitors’ information. Failure to abide by the new legislation could result in heavy penalties, so start taking steps to make your website GDPR compliant today!

If you were asked for the overriding reason your business has a website, the answer would probably be “to get more enquiries”.

“More sales”, “greater brand recognition” and “a replacement for our old fliers” are all valid reasons to have a brilliant web presence as a business, but generating quality enquiries is where the meat of its responsibilities lie.

Perhaps the number of enquiries you’re receiving via yours have stagnated, or you’re just starting out – whatever the reason for wanting more contact form completions, here’s the three golden rules by which you must abide:

Keep it simple – really simple

Give people what they’re looking for – instantly.

If you stumble across a book with a great title but find the first couple of chapters mind-numbingly tedious and rambling, why would you bother to finish it? The same goes for your website, only in the digital space, you have even less time to keep people engaged.

Cut the waffle out of your web copy, go easy on the number of images and navigational elements you include and keep everything short and punchy.

Most of the people who visit your website are time poor – they want answers as fast as you can give them.

Create multiple calls-to-action (CTAs)

A common misconception about digital marketing is that you need to have just one, clear call-to-action, when, in fact, the opposite is true.

Ask three website visitors what they want to achieve, and they’ll probably give you three different answers. The first might want to download a brochure; the second has heard about a great eBook you’ve written and wants to download it – quickly; the third wants to buy something – now.

For this reason, you need to add as many CTAs to your website as there are potential outcomes.

To get your creative juices flowing, here are some of the common interactions people will expect to have with your website:

Find a number to call you on

Email you directly

Download something

Request a call back at a time that’s convenient to them

Obtain a quote

Arrange an on-site visit from a member of your sales team

Send you something (e.g. a photo or spec)

Multiple CTAs aren’t just acceptable – they’re the done thing.

Don’t just make it technically mobile-friendly

Google now operates on a ‘mobile-first’ index. That means they take far more notice of the mobile version of your website; its desktop counterpart now takes second fiddle.

That means you need a brilliantly mobile-friendly website in order to rank well on Google and receive as many enquiries as possible.

There are of course plenty of technical things you’ll need to do to make your site mobile-friendly, but never look past the user aspect.

How many times have you visited a website only to be continually frustrated by having to zoom in and out to see content and find yourself jabbing at interface elements that don’t appear to respond?

Don’t be that business.

Pay attention to the way you design your mobile-ready site for those that will use it. Employ white space judiciously, keep it simple, and focus on avoiding the following common pitfalls:

Buttons that can’t be easily pressed with a finger (because they’re either too small or tightly packed – or both)

Text that is tiny

Big images that take forever to load

Long-winded forms that take forever to fill in and navigate

You can perform a quick test yourself, by loading up your website on your smartphone and seeing how easy it is to operate. How quickly do you get frustrated and why? Make notes and take them to your web developer!

Wrapping up

Relatively simple, isn’t it? Follow our tips above, and you’ll start to build a web presence that delivers when it comes to new enquiries.

People don’t visit your website to find out how great you are. They’re not interested in your business, it’s history or how many top awards you have sitting on the mantlepiece.

They care about one thing – themselves. We all do.

The visitors to your website are looking for an answer to a problem they have or a product that provides a solution to an ongoing challenge.

You may have exactly what they need or the answer that solves their problem. The content on your website should therefore address their pain and explain in plain English how you can help.

Here are six things you can do to your website content to make it more seductive and bring in more leads:

Put your big idea front and centre

Whatever it is that you have for your customers, put it front and centre.

When you visit Apple’s website, for example, their products hit you straight between the eyes. That’s because Apple knows they’ll grab the most attention. You can do the same with a bold image or big, captivating headline.

Work on the readability

Take a look at this blog’s intro. We’ve focused on short, sharp sentences and paragraphs.

Your web content needs to do the same to ensure readability and the ability for visitors to quickly skim for the info they want. Few people will read it all, so…

avoid chunky paragraphs;

promote the use of bullet points.

Include soundbites

A sound bite is a nugget of wisdom – a piece of text that is easy to remember and perfectly quotable. They often come in the form of straplines, and you can’t have enough of them on your website.

Stick to the rule of providing information in groups of three, for example “the thinnest, lightest, most beautiful device we’ve made”.

Create stories around your products and business

Head to most company ‘about us’ pages, and you’re met with long, drawn-out histories of how they came to be and their commitment to ‘constant improvement’.

That’s all a bit dull, isn’t it? Instead, tell a story about your business. What drives it? Who are the people behind it (the characters in this plot, as it were)? Give it a beginning, middle and make the customer’s role the end (i.e. the purchase!).

Present features as solutions to their problems

Let’s say you’re looking for a new tablet. You discover two manufactures who both offer bullet-pointed feature lists.

Manufacturer A:

10” screen

8gb of RAM

Stylus support

Keyboard case included

10 hours battery life

Manufacturer B:

Work on two apps at once with a 10” screen that improves productivity

Enough memory to ensure you’re never left waiting for a process to complete

Ditch your pen and paper and do everything with one device

Make the transition from laptop to tablet and simplify your tech setup

Work all day without ever having to hunt for a power outlet

Which one would you go for?

Overcome objections before they’re made

Your product or service isn’t perfect – that simply isn’t possible – but you can go a long way to reducing fear in buyers by overcoming objections before they’re made.

For example, if you’ve developed a new phone case that is glass-like in appearance, you could dispel fears about it’s durability by saying: “Even though our case is as smooth and clear as glass, it’s actually toughened plastic, so won’t shatter”.

Wrapping up

Follow our tips above, and you’ll quickly create a web presence that is both seductive and ready to turn passers-by into brand advocates – rather than boring them to death.

It’s time to ask yourself some very tough questions about your business website.

When it was built, you loved it. The design was of its time, the customer journey was well thought out and it reflected your brand values perfectly. Things change, though; web design trends and best practices evolve, and can outdate websites – fast.

For example, it was only recently that Google switched to a mobile-first index, placing the previous king of the search result jungle (the desktop-optimised website) firmly into second place. As a result, any website that has failed to take small screens seriously is likely to see its rankings drop significantly.

If your website isn’t receiving the volumes of traffic it once enjoyed or if your analytics tell regular tales of people dropping out of the visitor journey at crucial points, there’s a good reason for it – but you’re not going to like it.

People hate your website.

Sorry.

Here’s seven reasons that might be the case:

It isn’t mobile-friendly

It bears repeating: the mobile-first Google index is now live. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, it’ll disappear without trace.

It’ll also frustrate visitors. If you’ve ever cursed a website’s inability to display correctly on your smartphone, you’ll know exactly what we’re referring to. You have seconds to make a good impression online, and the first one you make will almost certainly be on mobile device these days.

Online security is something that is at the top of everyone’s minds in the digital age – make sure you give the people that browse your website ultimate peace of mind by implementing HTTPS encryption (it isn’t as expensive as you might think).

It features a laborious slideshow

We’ve all seen and been frustrated by them; the seemingly endless slideshow that sits atop many business websites will make or break the user experience.

Slow load times and acres of text and imagery don’t make for an engaging slideshow. Stick to three slides max and keep both the copy and images punchy and relevant. No one will sit through eighteen slides of War and Peace.

There’s too much waffle

As previously noted, you have mere seconds to catch someone’s attention online. Spend forever getting to the point, and you’ll lose them after the first paragraph.

Every word, sentence and paragraph on your website should tell an engaging story and have a purpose. Keep it short, concise and focused on the target market.

Which brings us onto our next point…

You’re saying “we” too much

Customers only care about themselves. They don’t care about your heritage, countless years of service or the cabinet full of awards in the boardroom.

What can you do for them? What questions do your products and services answer? What’s in it for the person visiting your site?

What do you want the people who visit your website to do once they’ve finished browsing? Without the right calls-to-action (CTAs), they’ll simply leave without making any form of contact, making the whole episode a rather pointless exercise.

Bearing in mind that every visitor will have different needs, you need to offer as many relevant CTAs as possible. Some will want a quote, others will want to download additional content, while many will just want to contact you.

Provide visitors with multiple options for completing their journey and they’ll make a decision that will offer you a vital insight into their position within the buyer’s cycle.

You’ve used too many tacky stock images

Stock imagery has its place, but use too much of it, or skimp on the low quality stuff, and you’ll quickly turn off website visitors.

Investing in unique imagery that is relevant to your business is smart. A day with a photographer might feel lavish, but it will result in images that will make your website jump off the page and fully reflect your business’s brand values.

Close that Google Images window!

Wrapping up

The dawning realisation that people hate your website isn’t particularly pleasant, but it’s a crucial step in building a web presence you can be proud of and rely on to attract quality traffic.

From quality traffic comes pre-qualified leads – so, ask yourself each of the questions above, and make changes where your business website falls short. Now.

What says “I love you” more than web design that draws in an audience and keeps them engaged long enough to foster an emotional connection?

Ok, a romantic spa break or unexpected marriage proposal may come close, but in business, nothing quite cuts it in the engagement stakes like a well-designed web presence.

Over the years, we’ve seen all manner of web technologies come and go. With each one, there has been a web design bandwagon aboard which many a marketing agency has jumped. Few stick around, though, due to the fact that many are more focused on technical prowess than usability and engagement.

Thankfully, those days appear to be behind us. What we’re left with now is a bunch of ever-advancing web technologies, which enable web designers to make business websites engaging and easy-to-use.

So, how can you set hearts pounding with your business website?

We’ve decided to highlight five ways any website can win the affections of your target audience:

Homepage videos

As far back as 2012, it was reported that 87% of marketers relied on video for the majority of their content creation.

There’s one very good reason for this – video is incredibly sticky. Pop a video on your homepage, and you’ll almost certainly start to drive higher engagement from visitors.

The video can be anything (within reason) – a behind-the-scenes tour, team intro or simple ‘to-camera’ piece about the history of the business.

Give it a go!

Proper CTA placement

What do you want visitors to your website to do?

Once they’ve read and digested the content on the website, where should they head next?

The answer might be to contact your sales team, sign up to a newsletter or make a purchase, but whatever it is, you need to make it an obvious next step.

Placement of the call-to-action is vital if you’re to win the attention of potential customers. By-and-large that means placing it prominently within the upper third of the website and ensuring it is a common element on all pages.

Off-grid elements

It shouldn’t be forgotten that entire sections of content and areas of user interaction can be hidden from view until needed. It’s why we regularly see ‘burger’ menus at the top left or right of a web page.

The most common element to hide in this way is the main navigation, which works fabulously in the modern age due to the fact that people are spending more of their time using smartphone apps that employ similar techniques.

A fixed header

An oldie, but a goldie.

Fixed headers have long been a staple of great web design because they provide simple, intuitive navigation for users, no matter where they happen to be on the page.

If they fancy jumping to a different section, the route will always be immediately obvious.

Subtle animations

We’ve seen all manner of fancy animations hit the web, from early implementations of resource-hungry Flash to the more recent incarnations of parallax scrolling.

The trick with animation in web design is to only use it when it offers a genuine benefit to the user. If it’s only there for show, an animation is nothing more than a distraction.

By instead implementing subtle animations that only make themselves known as the user scrolls down and interacts with the website, you’ll draw them in further and encourage interaction.

Bonus tip: Don’t forget the metrics (to measure engagement!)

Let’s say you follow all of the tips in this post and end up with a beautiful yet functional website. How will you set about measuring engagement?

Failing to do so may put your hard work to waste, and it’ll certainly prevent you from spotting opportunities to iterate and improve the design.

Avoid the common mistake of leaving a website to do its job in the belief that you’ve carried out the hard work required to make it a success. Install Google Analytics and pay particular attention to bounce rates, page interaction and time on site.

By doing so, you’ll quickly discover whether or not you really have set hearts aflutter with your lovingly-crafted new website.

Chances are, if you follow the tips above, you’ll almost certainly win lots of new admirers!

Google has got a bee in its bonnet about insecure websites. And it’s a rather big bee.

So big, in fact, that it’s now shining a very bright spotlight on any website that doesn’t have an SSL certificate.

“HTTP, we’re readying to call you out for what you are: UNSAFE!” tweeted Parisa Tabriz, manager of Google’s security team last January. She was referring to an upcoming change to Google’s Chrome web browser that would make it ultra-clear when websites aren’t secured via HTTPS.

What is HTTPS?

Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure, to give it its full name, is simply the secure version of ‘HTTP’, which is the industry standard protocol over which data is sent between a user’s browser and the website they’re viewing.

Websites that use HTTPS benefit from encrypted communication between the browser and web server. From a user’s perspective, the presence of HTTPS is usually denoted by a padlock symbol in the address bar of modern web browsers, but ‘https’ will also be present in the URL (e.g. ‘https://www.ihm.co.uk’).

So, what is Google doing, exactly?

The change to Google Chrome adds a prominent red ‘X’ to the padlock symbol whenever a website that doesn’t use HTTPS is detected. Previously, it simply displayed a blank white page symbol for such websites.

Originally announced back in 2014, the rationale behind the change was obvious – Google wanted to make it blindingly clear to the user when a website was using insecure methods to transport data to and from their device.

Insecure websites increase the opportunity for hackers to snoop or intercept communications – a threat that is more prevalent than ever in the digital economy and a key concern for anyone using the web. The presence of a red mark against a website, therefore, is likely to be taken seriously by most people.

“The goal of this proposal is to more clearly display to users that HTTP provides no data security,” Google’s Chris Palmer accurately summed up in an open forum back in 2014.

What’s an SSL certificate?

An SSL certificate is a small file stored on a web server which adds a cryptographic key to the data. When installed, it automatically activates the HTTPS protocol and enables the aforementioned secure transfer of data to and from web browsers.

The benefits of HTTPS and SSL for business

There are few threats online greater than hackers looking to steal vital personal or business information. If your business website has a valid SSL certificate installed, you’ll have taken a huge preventative step against hackers and those intent on intercepting your communications.

Without SSL and HTTPS, both your business data and that of the customer is at risk. The potential consequences of a breach simply don’t bear thinking about, and with Google Chrome now making it very clear indeed when a website isn’t secure, the brand damage and potential loss of business for those without SSL encryption could be significant.

Equally, and although not explicitly mentioned during Google’s announcement of the new Chrome feature, there’s always the chance that the search giant could begin penalising websites that are insecure by dropping their ranking within search results.

With relatively low cost of SSL certificates and the odds stacking up against insecure websites, investing in HTTPS is advisable for businesses of all sizes.

How do I add HTTPS to my business website?

So, you understand you need to add HTTPS to your website. Great! But how do you go about doing so? Thankfully, the process is relatively straightforward.

Just speak to us and if you use our hosting services we have the expertise required to get an SSL certificate up and running.